Photographic Evidence: The Witness Adds Ansel Support

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As pretty as it is, I don’t know why you’d share screenshots of The Witness [official site] – the primary response seems to be people screaming that your screenshot of a pebble contains the hugest of spoilers. However, bold video game photographers now have a new tool. J. Blo and Thekla’s puzzler has added support for Ansel, the super-swish camera mode exclusive to Nvidia cards. It lets players place the camera where they please, tweak lens settings like rotation and field of view, then save snaps in fancy formats like 63360×35640 or VR view-o-spheres. Pretty!

The Witness is the third game to support Ansel, following Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and (while I was on holiday) The Witcher III. All three of those are mighty pretty games, perfect for happy snapping. Ansel is far from gaming’s first camera mode but it is a pretty nice one.

If you want to break out your virtuacamera, you’ll need to update The Witness and your Nvidia drivers to the latest version. Then hit Alt-F2 while playing and it’ll open up the Ansel camera.

It is a shame Ansel is exclusive to Nvidia cards but such is – somehow, still, after all these years – the state of PC gaming.

Do share some pretty Witness screens if you have them, won’t you? I’ve not played the game because I believe in puzzling the immersive sim way – if you don’t want to think, just blunder on through until you find something to throw or hit – but I do adore looking it. This makes me immune to spoilers too. Heck, just look at how Pip analysed the colour of scenes as a way to investigate its style without giving anything anyway.

6 Comments

nVidia seems to have made a error with the latest game ready drivers where for some people Ansel mode is disabled, if Alt-F2 does nothing you can check this by going to C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Ansel\Tools and running NvCameraConfiguration.exe then enabling Ansel camera at the bottom of the window.

Th3 Witcher 3 just got Ansel support in the past few days too. Means I can now take some stereoscopic 360 shots to view in VR. It’s the next best thing to having actual VR support in the game and being able to see the world and experience the scale of it from a human perspective.